Walton's World Chapter List

Chapter One: Welcome to Walton's World

Chapter Two: That's Coming Out of Your Next Check!

Chapter Three: So You Let in a Loiterer?

Chapter Four: According to the Logo

Chapter Five: I Realize it's your First Day

Chapter Six: Right! Left! Jump!

Chapter Seven: The American Association of Retail Scientists

Chapter Eight: Do You Work Here?

Chapter Nine: A Constant, Simulated, Sense of Self-Actualization

Chapter Ten: So Sayeth the Book

Chapter Eleven: Reasonable Facsimile

Chapter Twelve: DIY WMD

Chapter Thirteen: It's All Blood Money

Chapter Fourteen: You Certainly Did Those Calculations on the Ground

Chapter Fifteen: Plan B

Chapter Sixteen: Doctor Rodriguez

Chapter Seventeen: A Really Stupid Hat

Chapter Eighteen: Caucasian Goo

Chapter Ninteen: Walton's World is No Longer in Need of Your Services

Chapter Twenty: A Whole Lotta Green

Chapter Twenty-One: Extensive Field Research

Walton's World: Chapter Twenty-One

 I sat in the back of the ambulance, a cup of water in my hands, a blanket over my shoulder, and a mask of oxygen strapped to my face. Allison sat on the bumper next to me as emergency workers tended to the more seriously injured around us. 

Walton's World: Chapter Twenty

 

I pushed Wells' corpse off of me as Allison offered me a hand. It wasn't hers, but instead the plasticine arm of a manakin, held in her hand.

"I thought you’d died when he started shooting at me," I said as she helped me up. She held up the arm. 

"I realized that in a case as small as these cameras have, they probably couldn't fit both a nine millimeter gun and a high-resolution camera." She said, dropping the manakin's arm, I figured I could put the rest of the puzzle together myself. 

Walton's World: Chapter Nineteen

  Allison lead the way, her attention shifting between the occasional scuff mark and checking around corners before we moved into the next aisle of America-themed detritus. I looked back behind us to see how far we were from the last bread-crumb of collectable train I'd dropped, and opted to place another one on our path, marking our latest progress with a train car paying homage to the Apache Wars, which I learned only ended in 1924? I resolved to look that up when I got home.

Walton's World: Chapter Eighteen

 

"Wells!" Allison said as the zombies slammed against the door behind us, "What are you doing?" 

"It's simple, really." He said, tapping at his tablet, "When Denise broke containment and showed up here, Prendick said we'd need to contain and trap Denise." Wells gestured towards the doors as a zombie tried to reach it's hand through the gap before pulling it back as the door closed around it. 

Walton's World: Chapter Seventeen

  The air duct opened up above a raised loft that wrapped around the three exterior walls of the utility room. We sat, shoulder to shoulder, peering through the slits in the air vents, trying to make out as much through the darkness as we could. It wasn't much. There was no skylight overhead, no distant glow from the towers to cast things in silhouette. Beyond a faint grey haze of light coming from the utility room door that leads out into the showroom floor. 

Walton's World: Chapter Sixteen

 

Allison passed me some of her water and the bag of trail mix. I was sweating profusely, but I think she also figured giving me a snack was a good way to keep me quiet for a few minutes, a well-tested strategy that my mother had perfected on long car trips. 

"I was very good at school." Allison started "Top of the class at my high school, received a number of scholarships, I could have gone to whichever college I wanted. I'd been told that being the best at high school is like being a big fish in a small pond, and that I should expect more competition when I got to college."

Walton's World: Chapter Fifteen

 

"Ahhhhhh! Ohmygoddontdropmedontdropmedontdropme!"

Walton's World: Chapter Fourteen

 

Wells then spent the next three minutes explaining the combination of breakers and switches we'd need to flip on the master breaker box that would deactivate the active countermeasures (read: guns attached to cameras) while still providing power to deactivate the passive countermeasures (read: the reason we can't open doors.)

Walton's World: Chapter Thirteen

I decided to walk back to what was likely to be ground zero of our bloody, phlegm-choked deaths, to survey progress on delaying death by EPA violation. I'd seen how Allison had treated Doctor Prendick while he was cooperating with her interrogation, and I didn't want to be around for what happened next, lest I be accused of being an accessory to elder abuse. 

There were maybe a half dozen workers in the refrigerator itself, and another half dozen on the outside, shining flashlights onto the machine and waving small devices about and looking serious. 

"Peterson." Arthur said, standing by the control panel at the back of the machine, "Could you give us a hand here."

"Patterson,” I corrected, but still approached, "What do you need?"  

Walton's World: Chapter Twelve

I leapt from the couch and dove for the closet. I grabbed the crossbow and pulled the string back, then leveled it at Wells.

 "Yeah, good luck with that," He said "I was running back to base to get more arrows when I fell off the girders."

 "Why'd you kill Doctor Prendick?" I said "He was your coworker!"

 "Oh trust me, he broke his NDA when he told you what he did, trust me, a crossbow bolt through the head is better than the death by litigation that Walton's World would have brought down on him."

Walton's World: Chapter Eleven

 

I was carried down the stairs and into the furniture department, through a series of blood-streaked showrooms depicting well-put-together master bedrooms, dorm rooms, and children's bedrooms advertising an optimistic idea that more storage options might make kids less messy. 

 What surprised me was that every time we walked through a room, it suddenly became illuminated. After spending so much time in the dark, it was nearly blinding.

Walton's World: Chapter Ten

  I dropped to the ground as another arrow struck Doctor Prendick in the chest. Allison fell to the ground next to me as a third arrow sailed overhead. 

"Easterners!" I yelled. 

Allison glanced up.

"The shots are coming from up high." She said, "We're sitting ducks."

I looked around. There were a few feet of open ground between us and apparel, and the racks of shirts would break up the line of sight of anything above us. 

Another arrow struck the linoleum near my head, and a thought flashed across my mind, as I started to count. 

Waltons World: Chapter Nine

 I walked a few steps behind Allison, opting to give her some space. She kept her eyes forward and her arms out, supporting herself on the office chair she was pushing. We'd torn the HDMI cables from the TV's and fashioned them into bindings to keep Doctor Prendick in the chair. I had used my knot-tying skills from Boy Scouts to make some bindings I was quite proud of and had felt it was best to make myself scarce while Allison's most recent memory of us was being useful. 

"So how," Allison said, continuing her interrogation as we walked, "Does a think tank designed to come up with fake studies to sell products get into AI-powered murder cameras and turning people into zombies."

"I think all of that is a mischaracterization of our work. Take a right here."

Walton's World: Chapter Eight

As we crouched down and listened, we realized the voice was coming from just over the shelves to our left. I looked through the merchandise and could see a faint light. I pushed through the merchandise on the shelves, which seemed to be collectible train cars, each themed around a different military intervention of the United States. I reached my hand through and moved aside train cars themed around World War Two, The Gulf War, and the 1871 Punitive campaign against the kingdom of Korea. There seemed to be a soft glow, emanating from behind the shelf.